Carceral listening

Tuning in to the paradoxes of prison

Presenter: Lucy Cathcart Frödén (Postdoc, University of Oslo, NOR)

Abstract

Over the past two decades, there has been a proliferation of prison-based music-making projects, and a parallel acceleration in academic interest in music and sound in carceral spaces. Opportunities to make music under conditions of detention have been recognised as offering a pathway for raising one’s voice and negotiating multiple identities. At the same time, there are complex paradoxes at play in facilitating the creation of music within the repressive conditions of the carceral state. The emerging field of sensory criminology overlaps with sound studies in its attention to complex, layered soundscapes and its ethical engagement with sonic worlds. Through short vignettes from collaborative research encounters in Scotland (through the Distant Voices project), Norway and Ireland (through the Prisons of Note project), this presentation will explore some of the paradoxes and tensions in prison-based music projects, and ask how we might understand attentive listening as an ethical intervention in this context.